Tune in Next Week

The curious staying power of the cliffhanger.

Some of the greatest shows on television today owe a debt to the serially told forms of the past, such as novels and soap operas.

Illustration by Miguel Gallardo

One of the happiest moments of my life was the night Dr. Kimberly Shaw tore off her wig. It was December, 1992, and my friends and I had been gathering weekly to watch “Melrose Place.” When our favorite character—a red-headed home-wrecker who had seemingly died in a car crash, then popped up months later, with little explanation—stood in front of the mirror, exposing a mysterious scar that wormed up her scalp, we jumped off the sofa in shock. Then we started dancing. We were that overjoyed not to understand, not to know what came next.

We’re living through a renaissance of ambitious television, although almost no one would describe “Melrose Place,” the definition of a guilty pleasure, as a harbinger of that phenomenon. Instead, we praise the great modern cable dramas, from “The Sopranos” to “Breaking Bad.” As viewers, we rely on hierarchies to govern our notion of television ambition: cable trumps network, drama is better than sitcom, adult is worthier than teen, realistic is more grownup than sci-fi, grim beats sunny, PBS documentary tops Bravo reality show, and “as good as Dickens” is superior to anything resembling a soap opera.

Some of these judgments are legitimate: “The Wire” is leagues deeper than “Law & Order.” But others are unquestioned ways of “ordering” television, a symptom of our anxiety about the medium and its low-rent habit of arriving in episodes, each crooking a finger to the next. If there’s a marker for television serialization—a scar of sensation worming up its scalp—it’s the cliffhanger ending.

Narrowly defined, a cliffhanger is a climax cracked in half: the bomb ticks, the screen goes black. A lady wriggles on train tracks—will anyone save her? Italics on a black screen: “To be continued . . .” More broadly, it’s any strong dose of “What happens next?,” the question that hovers in the black space between episodes. In the digital age, that gap is an accordion: it might be a week or eight months; it may arrive at the end of an episode or as a season finale or in the second before a click on “next.” Cliffhangers are the point when the audience decides to keep buying—when, as the cinema-studies scholar Scott Higgins puts it, “curiosity is converted into a commercial transaction.” They are sensational, in every sense of the word. Historically, there’s something suspect about a story told in this manner, the way it tugs the customer to the next ledge. Nobody likes needy.

But there is also something to celebrate about the cliffhanger, which makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience—like a bridge made out of lightning. Primal and unashamedly manipulative, cliffhangers are the signature gambit of serial storytelling. They expose the intimacy between writer’s room and fan base, auteur and recapper—a relationship that can take seasons to develop, years marked by incidents of betrayal, contentment, and, occasionally, by a kind of ecstasy.

That’s not despite but because cliffhangers are fake-outs. They reveal that a story is artificial, then dare you to keep believing. If you trust the creator, you take that dare, and keep going.

Long-arc television is just a Johnny come-lately when it comes to episodic storytelling. The original show runner was Scheherazade, the narrator of “A Thousand and One Nights.” Even the most put-upon NBC writer never faced such a demanding audience: a cuckolded king so bitter that he marries a new virgin each night, then lops off her head. Scheherazade volunteers to meet this regal head of programming, then begins her pitch—only to stop in the middle. And so on for a thousand and one nights, a new cliffhanger each dawn. By then, her audience has fallen in love with her, and they’ve had three kids, an ending that’s even more romantic than syndication, which requires only a hundred episodes.

The great nineteenth-century novels were famous for their cliffhangers, and many people associate the form with Charles Dickens, who wrote serial novels so complex, yet so rewarding, that one might even say they resemble “The Wire.” Printed episodically in magazines, Dickens’s cliffhangers triggered desperation in his readers. In 1841, Dickens fanboys rioted on the dock of New York Harbor, as they waited for a British ship carrying the next installment, screaming, “Is little Nell dead?” (Spoiler: she was.)

Yet the iconic cliffhanger derives not from Dickens but from “A Pair of Blue Eyes,” a little-known novel by Thomas Hardy, which was published in fifteen installments in Tinsley’s Magazine, in 1873. Despite its reputation, “A Pair of Blue Eyes” is anything but action-packed—it’s more “Felicity” than “Indiana Jones.” Elfride, the fickle vertex of a love triangle, spends her days hiking around towers, dropping the odd symbolic earring. Halfway through the book, she’s strolling with Mr. Knight, the older, more highborn and didactic of her suitors (whom she fell for when he panned her novel, as one does). The two engage in coy banter. Then he falls off a cliff.

Well, first he simply stumbles downhill, and Elfride follows. But, once he boosts her to safer ground, he loses his foothold, his love gazing down at him from the ledge. As Mr. Knight clutches “the last outlying knot of starved herbage,” the passage concludes, “A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. On a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the bank from his sight.” There is a paragraph break, and then one stark final sentence: “Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.”

This historic cliffhanger does not lead to an action sequence. Instead, in the next installment Hardy’s readers were treated to dense but also oddly riveting introspection, as Knight philosophizes about the unfairness of his intellect’s getting snuffed out, mistakes trickles of rain for a storm, and discovers that he is not in fact alone: he is eye to eye with a trilobite. Twenty-nine paragraphs later, Elfride reappears, drenched by rain. She has torn off her outer garments, which she twines into a rope so that she can pull him to safety.

The sequence is both laughably artificial and entirely convincing, a manipulation that may have been motivated by commercial demands but becomes an opportunity for existential exploration. It is by far the liveliest moment in the book. And it foretells the way cliffhangers have come to be used in ambitious contemporary television shows like AMC’s meth morality tale “Breaking Bad”—not merely as an engine for excitement but as a narrative challenge, a glimpse into the extremes of human experience. In Hardy’s day, novels were very much like TV: fiction was the medium decried for leaving “the mind collapsed and imbecile,” the half-commercial enterprise that inspired alarmist essays about addiction. Once novels began to be published in blocks, rather than in slivers, they became art, perhaps in part because the author and the reader were held at a more dignified distance.

But by then the cliffhanger—that viral sneak—had jumped into fresh formats. Radio programs conventionally featured thrill-packed endings, including the British Paul Temple series, a hit detective drama that ran from the thirties through the sixties, using a tune from the symphonic suite “Scheherazade” as its theme. Starting in the early sixties, cliffhangers became par for the course in comic books (and not merely for superheroes; two years ago, when the strip “Little Orphan Annie” ended, after eighty-six years in print, the plucky orphan had been kidnapped by a war criminal nicknamed the Butcher of the Balkans).

And then there were the movies. Although many assume that the cliffhanger began with “The Perils of Pauline,” the true pioneer of the genre was actually “The Adventures of Kathlyn,” which arrived in 1913, a year earlier than Pauline. Kathlyn Williams, who played a virginal blond heiress named Kathlyn Hare, raced through thirteen segments of the serial, pursued by a hunky, scheming Hindu named Umballah (Charles Clary). Each installment concluded with a titillating disaster, as Kathlyn evaded lions, tigers, leopards, wolves, baboons, and elephants (the producer owned a zoo), fled a volcano, and subdued her enemies with, to quote the script, “the natural electric force with which the Anglo-Saxon always controls the brown man.” It was the first significant movie serial.

These films became a production model for early Hollywood, but they originated as a publicity stunt for the Chicago Tribune, which was in a fierce circulation war with other Chicago dailies. Teaming up with William Selig, the founder of one of the first motion-picture studios, the Tribune distributed the films through the seedy circuit of nickelodeon theatres, with live piano as the soundtrack. They published ads aimed at working-class women, with headlines like “Young Ladies! Watch your Sweethearts. Kathlyn is coming!” As each segment débuted, its plot was printed in the newspaper; after that, the chapters were collected in a book. “Kathlyn,” in addition to being the first cinematic cliffhanger, was an early example of synergistic branding, and the paper reported that its circulation increased by ten per cent. The Tribune sold collectible postcards; there was also a dance craze, a clothing line, and a cocktail named for Kathlyn. “Kathlyn” was an early version of “Lost,” crossed with “Sex and the City,” and it spawned myriad imitators, from gangster serials to jungle adventures, a mini-industry that lasted thirty years—adding sound and color—running parallel to the development of full-length features and filling theatres with eager young addicts.

One might imagine that the first years of TV would mimic this lively and lucrative production model. But the early decades of prime time were pretty much cliffhanger-free, initially because television sets were luxury objects, as were many of the programs they aired. Produced in New York and performed live, the shows of TV’s first golden age included expensive one-offs, or elements within an anthology, like “Marty,” the iconic teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky, from 1953. These producers took as their inspiration literary fiction and Broadway drama, not serial movies or radio shows. There were also cop shows, variety shows and game shows—none with cliffhangers. Even once “I Love Lucy” began to revolutionize the market—creating a new model of syndication and relocating the industry to Los Angeles—sitcom episodes were designed to run in any order, not to tell ongoing stories.

The exception was daytime TV, which began cranking out soap operas, targeting housewives. In 1950, CBS aired the first network soap opera, “The First Hundred Years.” (It lasted two.) Like women’s magazines and romance novels, these shows were viewed by outsiders, and often by their own writers, as a tawdry industry—as were the popular radio soap serials of the thirties and forties, like “Today’s Children,” that inspired them. The genre’s name dripped with disdain: “soap” for the ads they sold, “opera” to parody the absurdity of feminine emotions treated as high drama. Televised daily, the soaps dragged out their plots slowly, but goosed the audience with cliffhangers. In the nineteen-sixties, more ambitious writers raised the stakes, with the gothic soap “Dark Shadows,” the social-relevance soap “One Life to Live,” and the prime-time sensation “Peyton Place,” which ran several nights a week. Whether good or bad, such shows attracted passionate fans, who adored the genre’s bold style and outsized characters, feeding off a fresh crisis every Friday.

By the mid-fifties, the evening TV schedule had largely dropped its highbrow aspirations; TVs got cheaper, the anthology series dissolved, and, as the audience widened, advertisers demanded that shows be simpler and more upbeat (“happy shows for happy people with happy problems,” as one adman described it to David Susskind, according to Stephen Battaglio’s 2010 dishy biography of the TV producer and talk-show host). For three decades, as prime-time TV was transformed, few shows—whether fun-trashy or edgy-political—employed cliffhangers, because few shows told the kinds of stories that could extend beyond an episode, let alone a season.

According to Jason Mittell, an associate professor of film and media culture at Middlebury College, whose book “Complex TV” comes out next year, the main exceptions were not dramas but two sitcoms, each of which was a satirical response to the daytime soap operas: “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and “Soap,” which aired in the late seventies. “Mary Hartman” was created in 1976, by Norman Lear, the pioneering sitcom creator behind hits like “All in the Family,” but, despite Lear’s pull, many stations ran the show late at night, considering it too avant-garde for early evening. At once a soap opera and an anti-soap, the show was an assault on a TV-addled audience, with its heroine becoming as alarmed by the waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor as she was by the revelation that her grandfather was the notorious Fernwood flasher. In the Season 1 finale, a cliffhanger, she had a breakdown on “The David Susskind Show” and was institutionalized; when the show resumed, she discovered that her fellow-inmates were a Nielsen-ratings family.

The 1977 series “Soap” was a lighter concoction than “Mary Hartman,” but it, too, brought serial DNA into prime time, including regular cliffhangers. Each week concluded with a cheerful narration (“Does Dutch really believe Eunice is planning a surprise shower for him? Or is Eunice really in for a surprise? Will Billy and his teacher ever be alone long enough to have an affair?”), followed by the kicker: “These questions—and many others—will be answered in the next episode of . . . ‘Soap.’ ” The first few seasons were written by Susan Harris, who had also been a writer for Lear on “All in the Family” and “Maude.” In “They’ll Never Put That on the Air: An Oral History of Taboo-Breaking TV Comedy,” by Allan Neuwirth, Harris’s husband and partner, Paul Junger Witt, described their aims not merely as satire but as an attempt to “free ourselves of the shackles of a really difficult storytelling form,” the enforced closure of episodic storytelling, in which characters rarely changed and plots couldn’t leap.

In 1979, NBC ran a ten-episode show called “Cliffhangers!,” an experimental homage to the early cinema serials, such as “Kathlyn,” which was quickly cancelled. But less than a year later the first great TV cliffhanger emerged, and it changed the model of network television. Initially, “Dallas” was a slow-moving nighttime soap opera about a family of Texan oil and cattle tycoons. The series had risen to become a top drama on CBS, when, on March 21, 1980, an episode called “A House Divided” aired. Larry Hagman’s J. R. Ewing—a villainous minor character who became, through Hagman’s magnetism, the smirking star of the series—was plugged in the gut. The nation had a new catchphrase: “Who shot J.R.?”

The real culprit behind the shooting was a network brainstorm. “We had done, I think twenty-two shows, and CBS was making so much money they wanted to extend it for four,” Hagman recalled, in 2010. “And our producers said, ‘Let’s just shoot the S.O.B. and figure it out later.’ ” J.R. was featured on the covers of Time and People. CNN, which had just been launched, devoted a series of segments to hyping the show, hoping for some pop heat during that grim year (hostages in Iran, the economy in the dumps). But the cliffhanger might have been less effective if Hagman hadn’t walked off the set. He flew to Europe and demanded a raise, which triggered rumors that the producers would resort to a plastic-surgery twist to replace him with Robert Culp. In July, a Screen Actors Guild strike delayed production for three more agonizing months.

By the time the resolution—“Who Done It?”—aired, eight months had elapsed, giving CBS an opportunity to rerun the original season. These delays made “Dallas” a global phenomenon. (A session of the Turkish parliament was reportedly suspended so that members could tune in.) The solution to the mystery was concealed even from the cast members, each of whom was filmed shooting J.R. Eventually, the culprit was revealed: Kristin, J.R.’s sister-in-law. (J.R. didn’t press charges, because she was carrying his baby.)

“Who Done It?” became the highest-rated episode in TV history, watched by an estimated three hundred and fifty million people worldwide. The show’s success spawned endless imitators, on soaps and non-soaps and sitcoms and dramas: weddings, births, bombs, the invasion of the Moldavian terrorist, Jim kissing Pam, a plane crashing into Wisteria Lane, Ross saying “I take thee, Rachel,” the illumination of the Hatch on “Lost,” and so on. Once soap entered prime time, its conventions fuelled the complex dramas of the nineteen-eighties, among them “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere.” These shows brought greater depth to storytelling, but they also relied on the pleasurable shocks of “junk” genres, including the cliffhanger—sometimes with brassy absurdity, as when Rosalind Shays plummeted down that elevator shaft on “L.A. Law,” in 1991.

David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” the critically adored auteurist breakthrough of the nineties, acknowledged its debt to the genre directly, with the soap-within-a-soap “Invitation to Love,” to which the show’s small-town characters were addicted. The series even ended with its own surreal cliffhanger, in the midst of uncertainty about a third season: Agent Cooper, possessed by the evil spirit that had killed Laura Palmer, bonked his head against a mirror, giggling maniacally and moaning, without explanation, “How’s Annie?”

In the late nineties, television took a great leap forward. This story could be told in many ways: by focussing on the quality cable dramas, starting with “The Sopranos”; by emphasizing luminous genre myths like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”; or by highlighting experimental sitcoms, such as the British version of “The Office,” themselves a reaction to the advent of reality television. Pugnacious auteurs emerged, resistant to TV formulas. The result was one innovation after another: juggled chronologies, the rise of antiheroes, and a new breed of challenging, tangled, ambitious serial narrative. Dramas often combined a plot of the week with longer arcs, a technique pioneered by “The X-Files,” allowing for subtler levels of irresolution. Some ambitious comedies incorporated serial elements, while others, like “Arrested Development,” satirized cliffhangers in much the way that “Soap” had.

While not every show embraced cliffhangers (David Simon’s “The Wire” resisted them), many series, like “24,” made a fetish of them or used them selectively, as elements of a primal cinematic universe, like “Breaking Bad,” a deep meditation on morality that was also a throwback to movie serials. In the gorgeously filmed Season 3 finale, Jesse (Aaron Paul), the young junkie immersed in the meth business, showed up at the door of the cheerful, eccentric Gale, a man targeted only for the crime of potentially replacing our antiheroes. Jesse held a gun, but his eyes filled with tears. His hands shook. A shot went off—but it was unclear what had happened. We had to wait more than a year to find out, but Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, had built his story skillfully enough that those thirteen months welled up with meaning. The show’s heart-in-throat suspense had become inseparable from its resonant themes, from the cruel calculus of modern capitalism to the American fantasy of masculine autonomy.

Technology was a crucial factor in this change, including DVDs, TiVo, and the emergence of a vibrant online TV-fan community. “The idea that viewers would want to watch—and rewatch—a television series in strict chronology and collectively document their discoveries with a group of strangers was once laughable, but is now mainstream,” Mittell writes in “Complex TV.” Television was no longer an ephemeral experience, to be watched and discarded: it could be collected, shared, and analyzed.

In this changing landscape, it’s worth acknowledging how cliffhangers, broadly defined, link disparate genres: they connect “Fringe” with “The Good Wife” and the languid, dreamlike “Mad Men” (which hung off a cliff for more than a year after Don ran off to marry his secretary). They echoed through the finales of the smart thriller “Homeland,” the exquisite dark comedy “Enlightened,” and the delirious melodrama “Revenge,” in which Madeleine Stowe stepped onto a jet rigged to explode. (I suspect that, like Kimberly, she’ll be back.)

These shows may have very different aims, but each of them uses the gap between episodes in a deliberate manner: they make manipulation a virtue. If the modern project for television critics is to move beyond comparisons to novels and movies, to find a way to celebrate and critique television in purely television terms, part of that struggle may require wrestling with, and at times embracing, the power of soapy, serial DNA—and the feminine, juvenile, commercial shame of it. Consider how even the most fervent fans still put down the shows they love, saying, “Well, really, it’s just a well-made soap opera”—even as soap operas themselves have disappeared from daytime TV, chased off by reality series and talk shows.

Besides, there’s another aspect of cliffhanger history: joy. When done poorly, the cliffhanger is all about shoddy craftsmanship, the creepy manipulation by a storyteller who has run out of tricks. When done well, however, it can be about much more: surprise, shock, outrage, and pleasure—the sort of thing that might send you dancing off the sofa. The cliffhanger is part of some of the silliest shows on TV; it’s also key to understanding many of the greatest ones. It’s the visceral jolt that’s not so easily detached from television’s most erudite achievements. But, then, that’s the mind-body problem of TV, a conversation that has only just begun.♦